Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest a member of Opus Dei a literary critic
and a poet in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From
glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time
student General Pinochet to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers the Chilean
landscape and faces of those now dead reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of
the 'wizened youth' who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS
ANDREWS 'The wit the horror the ambition the strangeness Roberto Bolaño's work is a
sprawling labyrinth of surprise bold invention and images that will live with you forever'
Chris Power 'Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into
the sublime the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill'
Georgi Gospodinov author of Time Shelter
